A Supreme Typo

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court reminded us that diction matters, unanimously ruling that by using the word “individual” rather than “person,” a federal statute limited liability for torture committed overseas to individuals, not to the organizations that employ them.

But the opinion itself shows that even the most punctilious organizations — say, the Supreme Court — can sometimes err when selecting their words. The ruling referred to one of the defendants as the Palestinian Liberation Organization — although the PLO’s actual name in English, as the briefs and lower court opinion correctly put it, is Palestine Liberation Organization.

At least three individuals involved in publishing the opinion made that error: Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote the court’s opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer, who filed a concurrence, and the court’s reporter of decisions, Christine Fallon, who prepared the syllabus, all used Palestinian instead of Palestine. The seven other justices all saw the final opinion before adding their names, if regular procedures were followed, as would have dozens of law clerks and other functionaries before the opinion was printed and distributed to the public Wednesday morning.

A Supreme Court spokeswoman, when informed of the matter, said it was a typographical error and would be corrected for the record.

To be sure, this is not the first time the Supreme Court has made a typo. In an 1857 case, the court inserted an extraneous letter in the name of respondent John F.A. Sanford. Of course, that was the least of the errors in the case that remains on the books as Dred Scott v. Sandford.

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